Abel Ferrara’s
Body Snatchers (1994) is a film about the radical substitution of
Same by Same, a fable of the Alter Ego – this Alter Ego conceived
as the very truth of the Self. The film’s narrative rests on the supplanting
of a Mother by a Stepmother. On the basis of that, key motifs displace and
replace each other in a malefic circuit of unimaginable substitution. The
best example is the cry ‘That isn’t my mummy!’ – yelled by little Andy (Reilly
Murphy), the legitimate son, but thought by Marti (Gabrielle Anwar),
the adolescent stepdaughter. At the film’s heart, a particular cluster of
scenes intensifies such figures of replacement: via development and multiplication,
they are incarnated in the weirdest, most fantastic bodies. This seven-and-a-half
minute sequence begins forty-two and three-quarter minutes into the film,
across Chapters Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen of the Warner Bros DVD
edition.

1. The original line
is: ‘Now there’s no one. You’re all alone. Who’re ya gonna turn to now?
Where ya gonna go? Who’re you gonna trust?’

Marti,
a Walkman to her ears, naps in the bath; in the marital bedroom, the stepmother,
Carol (Meg Tilly), rubs and massages the father, Steve (Terry Kinney), soothing
and helping him drift off to sleep. Thus the ‘snatching’ – requiring the
sleep of its victims – can begin. Both Marti in the bathtub and the father
in his bed are invaded by the spongy tendrils that suck bodies up, empty
them out and replace them with another, substitute body which quickly forms
in the image of its ‘model’. Marti, however, suddenly awakes, and her incomplete
double crashes down from the false-ceiling into the bath. Marti struggles,
rips off the tentacles and flees, while her double – the horrible image
of a girl with blank eyes – floats among the domestic debris. Marti runs
into her parents’ bedroom, implores her father to wake up, and rips off
the sickly-white network of fibres that is currently vampirising him. As
Steve rises, his bristly, slimy double suddenly appears, sliding out from
under the bed. This thing grabs Marti’s ankle; she gets free, screaming
in terror, as the creature folds back into the darkness, leaving only a
dark, viscous trail. The impassive stepmother waits for her spouse in the
hallway, hoping to convince him to not resist – for life will be beautiful
if, like everybody else, he just renounces emotion and individuality. And
she recites the bewitching chant that Body Snatchers reworks from
a tormented love scene in Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs
Diamond (1960): ‘Where you gonna go? Where ya gonna run? Where ya gonna
hide? Nowhere. Coz there’s no one ... like you ... left.’ (1) Steve collapses
in tears into his wife’s arms. Marti, having collected her half-brother,
interrupts the couple, prompting Steve to break from Carol’s menacing, seductive
embrace. Marti, Steve and Andy all flee, as the stepmother transforms herself
into a screeching Medusa – mouth wide open and index finger pointing, branding
the trio with a universal condemnation.

What is the point of
this proliferation of spongy creatures? Why these chimeras who make their
entrance springing out from under a bed, or falling from the ceiling?
Of course, they can be explained away in terms of generic convention,
as simple monsters or ghosts. But, equally, it is possible to feel that
no apparition here is merely indifferent – leading to the speculation
that, the more bizarre things get, the greater the illumination produced.
Here, for example, in this logic of the double, we are suddenly confronted
by a true figural event: in truth, something does not match. Why
is the fantasy derailed in this way? Why risk such incoherence? Must we
put it down to the tendency of a dream to fade and disintegrate – or,
quite the contrary, is it a doubling of the vigilance which lies at the
very heart of this dream? Why, above all, is there this overrunning of
the narrative by different physical statuses? Why do these reflections
suddenly take the form of rough drafts, sketches, anatomical re-drawings,
threatening from every direction (up, down, in, out) the integrity of
a body that they return to a state of indescribable fragility? And why
do these bodies fall horribly upon other bodies in order to make them
scream?

As is insured by the
subjective sound of the Walkman, this sequence sits within Marti’s viewpoint
in order to elaborate a fantasy-scenario: the creation of an incestuous
family. Marti proceeds in three stages. First, she interrupts the
‘primal scene’ not once but twice, first in the parents’ bedroom and then
out in the hallway, when she forces Steve to brusquely abandon Carol.
Second, she discredits the mother-figure, whom she treats as a Wicked
Stepmother and then as, literally, an Alien. Typical maternal tags are
inverted into dark threats: telling Marti ‘your tub’s full’, or the little
boy ‘get in bed’, amounts to sending them to their death; in this story,
the saying ‘night, night’ means ‘die’. It is clear that this process of
disqualification is not applied to a specific stepmother, but to an abstract
maternal figure: what seems, at the outset, to be the supplanting of mother
by stepmother becomes hypothetical and in a deep sense anecdotal, giving
rise to a phantasmic scenario that draws everything it treats into an
endless circuit. Third, Marti takes Carol’s place: she becomes the mother
of her brother, she tends to him, wakes him, takes him in her arms, dresses,
carries and rescues him; she earns her new role, becoming the only feminine
element in a wholesome family – while the Wicked Stepmother infects the
world and all minds with her intolerable presence. However, for such a
scenario to reach the stage of fulfilment, procedures of translation,
deduction and repetition, tangled up in an intense somatic circuit, must
be invented. These procedures are pathways of defiguration, and
six such pathways can be discerned in this sequence of Body Snatchers.

1. The Snatching Principle

This is an economical
invention involving the absolute alteration-by-substitution of Same by
Same. It allows the proliferation of every kind of metamorphosis, since
these alterations never truly affect their source. The absence of pathos
which, within the fiction, characterises the Body Snatchers species, proves
the everyday strangeness of creatures at least as much as it proves the
unalterable integrity of those whom the fantasy seeks to devour. It is
as if, at the moment of destroying these creatures, the dreamer took care
to, above all else, preserve them, sealing them up within themselves
like some sacred relic beyond every chance vicissitude.

2. Creation of Somatic
Echoes

A system of visual
and sonic echoes is established between father and daughter, linking and
relating them in a powerful manner. They are both nude: the daughter in
her bath, the father in his bed. They are both immersed in an aqueous/watery
situation – the daughter in the soapy water, the father anointed by the
massage oil which evokes an evil potion – and both times this has been
prepared by the mother with her witch-like locks. Their simultaneous falling-asleep
plunges them into a situation of dreaming, aided by two aural forms of
hypnosis: the music on the Walkman for Marti and the mother’s lullaby
of ‘I love you, too’ for Steve, loving declarations and caresses functioning
as so many invitations to death. Finally, Marti and Steve are in two,
contiguous spaces: Marti’s snatcher comes from above, falling from the
roof, while Steve’s snatcher emerges from the floor under the bed – like
two sides of the one, cleaved figure. In short, the film works to conjoin
father and daughter.

The sequence produces
three paradoxical bodies. Firstly, two recognisable bodies. The double
from which the terrified Marti flees amounts to an unfinished corpse;
while Steve’s double resembles an old man as yet unborn – a biological
inversion whose imaginary recalls Hesiod’s description of the Iron Age,
the last era in which the world was invaded by the negative, men being
born in their senile form and living out their lives backwards. (2) Here,
we must note a fascinating oddity: contrary to the other snatchers, who
form themselves in a precise mimesis, the father’s double does not resemble
him at all. He is an old man, an ancestral figure, whose wrinkled, sticky
appearance evokes bodily putrefaction and liquefaction far more than any
blooming. (In fact, if he resembles anyone, it would have to be Abel Ferrara)
(3) This double serves to emphasise, by contrast, the father’s extreme
youthfulness, easily paired with his daughter by virtue of his rather
adolescent character (imputed, by the soldiers at the military installation
where he has moved with his family, to a hangover from his days as a leftist
ecologist). According to this initial figurative choice, the father can
pass for his daughter’s fiancé; but here, more violently still,
he also becomes her son. He must be lulled to sleep, he does not like
to be in bed alone, he cannot bother looking after Andy, he cries in his
woman’s arms – in short, his irresponsible behaviour infantilises him,
while Marti affirms herself as the head of the family. But the strangest
and most paradoxical figure of all is the intermediary body between
father and daughter. The golden-hued shots of silent, embryonic gestation
work as a linkage between low and high, daughter and father – we cannot
say which snatching they belong to, they produce a body-too-much, a body
which displaces more than it replaces. This figure represents, all at
once: the crux of the problem ‘what is a body, what is there between bodies?’;
the incest-monster; an indistinct body between bodies; and, already, the
child which is the fruit of incest. This is a pure figure of the forbidden,
and of what is beyond the Self – a psychic complex on which Body Snatchers
elaborates a direct, detailed and critical description.

4. Investigation into
the Symbolic of Organicity

Don Siegel and Philip
Kaufman alike – in their previous versions (1956 and 1978, respectively)
of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers story which, as Ferrara justly
said, should be remade every few years – privileged ellipsis and enigma:
is this body which has suddenly turned up again the Same, or now an Other?
Should we trust the evidence of our senses, or intuition? Ferrara, by
contrast, uses metamorphosis and mystery: he renders the physical detail
of mutation visually, diving into the most secret parts of the body, exposing
its folds, strata and substance, in images which return to the remarkable
iconographic invention in the depiction of the cosmic migration of vegetable-extraterrestrials
that opened Kaufman’s film. Using the same Special Effects expert (Tom
Burman), Ferrara’s film explicitly presents itself as a ‘graft’: it absorbs
the heritage bequeathed by its predecessors (the paranoiac narrative),
but it opens up the core hitherto left obscure, i.e., the trial involved
in having a body, including the experience of encountering the body of
an Other.

At least five traits
characterise the treatment of organicity in Body Snatchers – starting
with the primal agony associated with orifices. Visible orifices: nose,
mouth, ears, eyes, which one blocks/stuffs during an embalming so as to
halt the process of corruption, and which are here the openings into which
the trembling, other-worldly rootlets infiltrate themselves. Invisible
orifices: Carol’s oily caress renders Steve’s entire body porous, opens
it at every point, massage becoming kneading, a sculpting which offers
the body up to the ‘unformed’. Of course, the aim is to send someone asleep
– but, more than that, to defigure him. The shot where the camera tips
over in order to demonstrate the unformed aspect of the back being moulded
by the mother – inevitably evoking the prologue of Hiroshima, mon amour
(1959) – indicates that the film deliberately places itself on the side
of fantasy. In a monstrous enlargement, the paternal pores are reprised
by the holes in the roof which allow the crawling tentacles to filter
through to the daughter: an imaginary of penetration as rape fills
the entire space.

Next, the organic substance
itself undergoes a profoundly archaic treatment. Here, the body does not
comprise a structure of flesh and bone, but a mix of aquatic plants, bulbs
and filaments which confuse three primeval substances: plasma,
placenta and plankton. Plasma: the film’s gestation shots
exhibit the plastic virtues of opalescent and viscous liquid, the germinating
aspect, the complex organic structure, and of course the fact that it
is the repository of hereditary characteristics. Placenta: the images
exhibit a fleshy, spongy mass and, above all, this essential phenomenon
of representing an ‘originating organ’ that is half-fśtal and half-maternal,
i.e., it is the only intermediary organ: it belongs to two bodies simultaneously
and guarantees the transition between them. Plankton: the images exhibit
the capacity to displace themselves, the transparency, the coexistence
of animal and vegetable as well as the possible possession of venomous
organs, thus introducing death into this ensemble of vital, fertile materials.
Overall, the gestation shots mingle, indistinctly, phylogenesis
(formation of a species) and ontogenesis (formation of an individual)
– a confusion that occurs due to the vegetable biological model of germination.
The image of the embryo thus refers, simultaneously, to the human species
in general and to the archaeology of life, a complex of abstract, animal
and vegetable characteristics which inform (obscurely) the human. Reinscribed
within this remarkable fantasy-circuit, the biological imagery also assumes
a psychic signification: a dream of incest devouring humanity since the
dawn of time. On this level, the embryo in Body Snatchers forms
a figurative diptych with the embryo in 2001:A Space Odyssey
(1968): Kubrick’s Astral Fśtus points to the future, new beginning, becoming;
while Ferrara’s inchoate creature returns us to life’s origins, the archaic,
malediction.

4. ‘That
which is the object of sight is the visible, and this kind of object comprises
both colour and something which though it can be given by an account has
no name.’ Aristotle (trans. Hugh-Lawson Tancred), De Anima (On the Soul)
(London: Penguin, 1986), p. 173. Phosphorescent bodies are this ‘kind of
object’ – paradoxical bodies, since they only become visible in the dark.

But this
archaic imagery floats within an ultra-modern chromatism. The fluorescent
tints derive not only from natural phosphorescence (always, moreover, the
sign of an event within the dimension of the visible), (4) but also from
neon lights, atomic radiation and fission. These very modern yellow-green
colours redistribute the motifs according to at least three effects, expressing:
the contemporaneity of this affective archaism in our psychic economy; the
blinding nature of fantasy; and the fact that we must henceforth re-view
humanity in the poisoned light of Hiroshima, Minamata and Chernobyl.

There is neither contradiction
nor tension, quite the contrary: the equivalence of archaic and modern
is affirmed particularly by the visual echo established between the black
cords of the Walkman and the milky snatching-threads that vibrate in unison
around Marti’s face. This analogy allows us to simultaneously insist on
the subjective, oneiric nature of the phenomenon, as well as resolve the
co-presence of these symbolic elements: it is a matter of observing the
resurgence of the archaic within the materiality of the modern world.

The final major element
which the sequence uses to treat organicity is also modern: the plastic
sheath within which the snatchers grow, at once a layer of glazed gelatine
and a hermetic canvas to cover the corpse. In this transparent, crinkled
top-layer, which stifles and protects at the same time, the body is packed,
stored, congealed, industrialised, shielded from contagion by microbes.
But in this case, what is packed and conserved is contamination itself,
the propagation of a complex, nasty proliferation. The invention of such
a substance allows the film to tackle the ambiguous status of protection,
which is simultaneously necessary and asphyxiating. This difficulty relates
both to a typical adolescent torment (how to put up with one’s parents)
and an extremely timely industrial problem – namely, the fact that conservation
metamorphoses and destroys life as much as it preserves it from corruption.
Where, in our industrialised world, do we locate toxicity? In the microbes,
or the preservatives? Body Snatchers tackles head-on this new but
henceforth terribly ordinary question.

5. Anatomical Circulation

Ear, torso, back, mouth:
Body Snatchers makes these body-parts the object of some unforgettable
shots. But the circulation privileges two organs that possess a particularly
powerful symbolic value: eye and hand. The circuit of the eye is rich
in paradox. It starts with Marti’s closed eyes as she sleeps: the images
derive from someone who is not looking. It continues with the embryo’s
gestating eyes: on the basis of mental images, a gaze forms itself – these
images are always watching us. This subject-less look refers ahead to
the preceding sscene, a shot/reverse shot volley, combined with a tracking-in
movement, alternating between a white mother (Carol) and a hitherto unseen
black mother (there is no doubt as to this identity, as she carries a
child in her arms), which ends on an extreme close-up of Carol’s eyes:
at the very basis of life, there subsists and stirs the horror of having
a mother – a mother who may herself be good, but is in a sense inevitably
bad in that she represents the unpayable debt incurred by our coming into
the world. Like Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Body Snatchers
confronts the anguish of filiation; but while De Palma chose the motif
of blood to explore this theme, Ferrara picks a much more problematic
motif: the placenta, laying an eminently concrete physiological foundation
for this horror of having a body-in-common ... The third gaze belongs
to Carol’s empty eyes, a figure of self-absence. Thus, mother and daughter
each introduce, in their own fashion, an antithetical hallucination: Marti
lets defiguring transference proliferate, while Carol actively unleashes
the proliferation of exact sameness – her final Pythian discourse announcing
the rule of universal resemblance, uniform and unstoppable. The figure
of Marti thus represents image-as-complex, i.e., as the personalised proliferation
of alteration; while the figure of Carol represents image-as-copy, the
invasion of the image-as-sameness, and this same image absolutely everywhere
(narrativised as the body snatchers’ military takeover of the world) ...
Finally, the film scarcely needs to emphasise Marti’s wide-open eyes as
she takes in the sight of her parents in their disquieting clinch. What
obviously disappears from this circuit is the possibility of an ordinary
gaze, a gaze which would adapt ‘appropriately’ to the exterior world in
order to allow difference.

The circuit of the
hand is no less fertile. It begins with Carol’s caresses. Then, the first
identifiable ‘extremity’ on the gestating body is a hand with outstretched
fingers – pointing to a dimension of the creation of life which is, in
this instance, mythological. The hand of Steve’s corpse-like double which
grips Marti’s ankle: the only tactile relation between father and daughter,
and the single note of terror in this film of anguish, picturing incest
as an intolerable grasp. The sequence ends on Carol’s pointed finger,
paired with her cry of damnation. But, more generally, the prehensile
organs anamorphose and extend themselves in this slimy network of snatching
which empties out being: they manifest the contact-phobia which is exacerbated
at the onset of adolescence, when it becomes difficult to bear one’s own
body, let alone the bodies of others. The insistence on the hand, as physical
organ and as the bearer of gesture, allows the posing of the issue of
power as hold: the threatening hold of the outer world over the
inner world; and the hold of fantasy over reality – and vice versa.

6. A Plastique of Permeability

Body Snatchers
thus represents a vertiginous investigation into the permeability of phenomena.
The snatching principle allows an exteriorisation of organic human networks,
in two senses: it surveys the various corporeal networks (viscera, nervous
system, musculature, etc); and it metaphorises the movement of substances,
whether as circulation (blood, nerves) or as transformation (corruption,
gestation). The body’s interior is no longer offered via a cutaway diagram,
but as a rhizome. Why? Because what is brought to light subordinates this
corporeal imagery to a fantasy logic, and because the human body is no
longer given as an objective thing but as the primary material of dreaming.
Here, in fact, it is impossible to find any trace of the ‘flesh itself’,
only its somatisation – i.e., the restitution of the work of the imaginary
upon the body: desire for penetration, incestuous desire, maternal desire.
Laying bare the workings of fantasy in this way conjures a monster, which
can be glimpsed in the improper translations, the unexpected linkages
(eg, from high to low), the impossible figures (the incomplete corpse
or the born-dead old man in whom one can perhaps glimpse the end-point
of this fantasy – Marti aborting her own father). The last word of the
film recycles Carol’s line: ‘There’s no one like you left.’ This sums
up the problem of singularity – ‘this body is mine, I am this body, there
will never be another’, the singularity of the Person is irremediable,
and experiences itself as tragically isolated – which the film converts
into a story of paranoia. But the opposing prospect – ‘I am every Other’
– is equally impossible, since (as the film shows) the individual remains
haunted by a dream of fusion, represented in this sequence by the incest
fantasy and, more generally, by a nightmare of interconnection
where the individual is plugged (even despite itself) into anything and
anybody, to the point of delirium and exhaustion.

Thus, the use of the
double exhumes what is unavowable, by redistributing corporeal signs and
assuring the indistinction of reality and dream (somatisation). In this
figurative economy, the film’s political dimension – i.e., its critical
treatment of the exigency of physiological and mental mutation demanded
of Civilised Man in an industrialised and militarised world – makes its
presence felt at the level of phantasmic intimacy. But, above all, it
is the work of images envisaged as prototypes of possible relations
which, in Body Snatchers, rigorously articulates a hypothesis concerning
the existence of a somatic archive, and a reflection (of an anthropological
order) on what threatens our species.